Buried Treasure: Travels Through The Jewel Box

Victoria Finlay

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Review

In her preface, Finlay says that she started thinking about jewels while researching her book Colour, which came out some years ago to considerable acclaim.  Then she tells us that she was given an engagement ring composed of three fragments of mosaic from the Hagia Sophia which, though not in themselves jewels, have something of their precious status because of their special origin.  Already the book is defined as both a professional and a highly personal enterprise.  But what could never have come across among the bullet points of the author’s proposal is her zeal.  She has obviously found it a thrilling and fascinating book to write.

The jewels she concentrates on are amber, jet, pearls, opals, peridot, emeralds, sapphires, rubies and diamonds.  There is no sense that she regards one of these as inferior to another: each is as good as its stories.  With amber, they range from a chunk found in a cave in Cheddar Gorge that is said to have been traded twelve and a half thousand years ago, to her own attempt to find out about mining at a gulag in Kaliningrad, to the Prussian Elector’s gift of the Amber Room to Peter the Great in 1716, which vanished during the Second World War.  Then we are in glamorous Whitby with jet, the fossilized remains of monkeypuzzle trees that once grew densely over northeast Yorkshire.  Never mind that jet went out of fashion with Queen Victoria, Finlay has urgent news about the Romans, Cybele, a transvestite skeleton and a walk she took along a beach with a local man.  We are introduced to a retired pearl-fisherman on a housing-estate in Scotland, who is ‘rarer than the pearls and… even harder to find’, before hopping to oyster farms in Japan and the story of Mikimoto’s cultured pearls.  Opals take Finlay to Australia, peridot to Arizona; in Egypt, like one of those intrepid English lady travellers, she noses out Cleopatra’s emerald mines; in Sri Lanka she finds sapphires and in Burma, rubies.  Only with diamonds does she stay at her desk, apart from a modest dash to Antwerp.

This book plainly involved a huge amount of travelling but it is only significant as it illuminates the scarcity and mystique of the gems.  The point is always what Finlay finds when she gets there, both the stories and the stone itself.  She is not satisfied until she has got to the source of the material and touched it, talked with miners and dealers, and placed them in a still-unfolding history.  Throughout, there is an extraordinary sense of abundance and prodigality as anecdote and information accumulate, all neatly held in place by the book’s clear structure, like a clutch of trusty hairgrips.  But it is the intensity of Finlay’s fascination with her subject and her passion to communicate it that makes the book so compelling.  By sharing it, she makes the reader – or this one, at least – feel like the beneficiary of a wonderfully generous gift.

And the final chapter about diamonds has one of the most extraordinary and hilarious conclusions I have ever come across.  Well worth finding out about.

From a review in the Spectator - review by Johnny de Falbe